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I would like to see GPS, walkie talkie, mp3, video, internet, camera, telescope, and unlimited minutes and text messaging. I would also like the phone connected to my home phone; an automated paging service.

Bronze

Oct 11, 2008

0

ctaylor52 said:

I would like to see GPS, walkie talkie, mp3, video, internet, camera, telescope, and unlimited minutes and text messaging. I would also like the phone connected to my home phone; an automated paging service.

Click to expand...

That would be one great piece of technology but I wouldn't hold your breath,

1. A gamepad. Please. In addition to, if not instead of, a 5-way navigator. 5-way navigators are useless for arcade games. While you're at it, make sure it can read two switches at once (for diagonals).

Something like this would be pure nirvana:

But a reasonable alternative would be a gamepad combined with the earpiece/speaker, like one or more of the older Sidekicks have:

2. Extend the digitizer onto the side bezel, like the Pre is supposed to do, and use it for vertical scrolling. Do it on both sides to accommodate the thumbs of both left and right-handed users. Make sure both can be independently disabled if desired (preferably in hardware), to ensure that the bezel on the OTHER side of the phone won't end up picking up unintended motions and screw things up.

3. The usual hardkeys. For the love of god and everything holy, don't make EVERYTHING touch. And make the hardkeys physically distinct, so someone can grab the phone with one hand, locate the desired button by feel, and press it without having to look directly at the phone.

4. Two hardkeys on each side, with enough resistance to keep the button from being pressed by the weight of the phone, and some kind of tactile feedback to let the user unambiguously know when contact is made, and when contact is broken. Idea: for the vibrator, give it a brushless stepper motor whose axis of rotation is perpendicular to the screen (ie, the weight rotates clockwise and counterclockwise with respect to the screen) and at least four defined stopping points at 0, 90, 180, and 270 degrees. When a side button gets pressed, give the weight a hard kick towards the button that was pressed. When it gets released, spin the weight 180 degrees to the opposite position away from it.

Use case #1: thumb in contact with the upper button on one side, index finger in contact with the lower button on the other side.

Use case #2: index finger on upper side button, middle finger on lower side button.

Use: novel input method loosely based on morse code (using various permutations of the two buttons as chords & shift keys to enable things like backspace, return, upper/lowercase, punctuation, etc) for situations like driv^h^h^h^h discreet text entry (say, one hand in your backpack or purse holding the phone and doing text entry somewhere like a classroom).

Another novel use for the side buttons: combined with speech recognition, you could write the phone app so that if you press and hold a button during a call, it mutes the mic so you can speak one or more digits that get injected into the outbound audio stream as DTMF tones.

Ex: "Please enter your account number now." (user presses and holds side button, then says "two nine zero six five" and releases the button, at which point it sends the dtmf tones one by one ). Or, if you pressed, released, then pressed and held the button, it would play the dtmf tones as soon as you spoke the digit for each one. Since this is open-source, someone could customize it to substitute letters or words for each digit as a code, or a code word that corresponds to all the digits, so if someone eavesdrops all they'll discover are the spoken words that play the PIN code on that specific phone.

5. At least 640x480 resolution, on a display no smaller than the one on the HTC Vogue.

6. Not hardware-related, but a text input panel that acts like Graffiti 1 would instantly win lots of love from Palm refugees. If you must make it Graffiti 2 to keep the patent lawyers happy, make it trainable, so users could train it to recognize Graffiti 1 strokes anyway after purchase.

7. GPS and camera go without saying as mandatory and non-negotiable. Low-res with wide dynamic range & good low-light sensitivity wins over mega-megapixel resolution. A bright white LED would be nice, even if it ended up being useless for photos... they still make handy flashlights ;-)

8. Don't matrix the hardkeys. Or at least ensure that it's possible to simultaneously press every permutation of two hardkeys and reliably determine which two are depressed. Combined with gestures that include multiple presses and press-holds, you can get an amazing number of overloaded virtual hardkeys out of two physical buttons.

9. Make sure the phone can comfortably fit in both a rear and side pocket while wearing jeans. Women might swoon over ultra-thin phones, but a thick narrow phone fits in a back pocket a lot more comfortably than a wide-but-ultrathin phone... and is likely to survive accidentally sitting down with it in the pocket a lot better than the ultrathin design, too. Plus, a phone that's TOO small and thin is awkward to hold and use.

10. Please, for the love of god, give it a vibrator that's strong enough to feel with the phone in the back pocket of loose-but-not-baggy jeans. Every single phone I've owned over the past 10 years has been worse in this respect than the one that came before it. My Samsung SPH-i300 was tolerable. My PPC-6700 was weak. My HTC Vogue's vibrator is barely perceptible holding the phone in my hand, let alone in a pocket.

11. Don't forget the stylus. Check out the telescoping Seido styli for the HTC Vogue with built-in ballpoint pen. Please, make it insert into the top, and make the retention mechanism strong enough to keep it from falling out.

12. Hopefully it goes without saying, but bluetooth is absolutely non-negotiable. My cell phone is my real phone, and I have an AT&T cordless phone at home that pairs with it (otherwise, my phone would be on the wrong floor ~half the time, and in the wrong room ~80% of the time).

13. If you can, try to bully Sprint and Verizon into allowing phones with R-UIM cards. Sprint is probably a lost cause, but Verizon might be open to reason. Tell them it'll cut their insurance claims, because THEN people with expensive PDA phones won't have to take them to the beach or on canoe trips (because it's their only phone and they have no choice). It'll also make life easier for developers... we can buy a second line from them and a cheap, unlocked R-UIM phone made for India or China, then swap the two R-UIM cards back and forth at will. When working on development tasks, I can put my "real" R-UIM card into the basic phone, and my "development" R-UIM card into the Android phone & crash it freely without having to worry about missing a call while it's rebooting. Then, when I'm either feeling confident that my app works reliably, or I've reflashed it back to firmware known to be reliable, I can swap the R-UIM cards again and go back to using the Android phone as my "real" phone.

(note: for anyone who's never heard of R-UIM cards, they're an extension to GSM SIM cards for CDMA phones. In fact, you can use a R-UIM card in a GSM phone as if it WERE a SIM card. If you own a PPC-6700, take out the battery and look at the cavity under it... outside the US, there would be a socket there for the R-UIM card)

14. Make sure that the bluetooth drivers can establish multiple simultaneous virtual com ports. Why? Embedded hardware hobbyists will love you for it. IrDA ports might be history, but someone familiar with homebrew embedded hardware projects can always glue a BlueSMIRF to an IR LED with a Propeller, PIC, or AVR and use his phone as a grossly over-engineered universal remote anyway (Android to BlueSMIRF via Bluetooth, BlueSMIRF to microcontroller via UART, SPI, or I2C, and the MCU driving the LED through brute-force bit-banging) ;-)

15. I have no idea what its official name is, but the velvety black plastic used for the Sprint Touch's case is the greatest material you could ever use for a cell phone. It's not slippery. You can firmly and comfortably grip it without feeling like you're trying to hold on to a wet bar of soap that's been dipped in a bucket of K-Y. IMHO, there's an extra-toasty spot in hell reserved for the idiot who picked that horrible, slippery plastic used for Treos and PPC-6700. ;-)

Bronze

Oct 11, 2008

0

miamicanes said:

1. A gamepad. Please. In addition to, if not instead of, a 5-way navigator. 5-way navigators are useless for arcade games. While you're at it, make sure it can read two switches at once (for diagonals).

Something like this would be pure nirvana:

But a reasonable alternative would be a gamepad combined with the earpiece/speaker, like one or more of the older Sidekicks have:

2. Extend the digitizer onto the side bezel, like the Pre is supposed to do, and use it for vertical scrolling. Do it on both sides to accommodate the thumbs of both left and right-handed users. Make sure both can be independently disabled if desired (preferably in hardware), to ensure that the bezel on the OTHER side of the phone won't end up picking up unintended motions and screw things up.

3. The usual hardkeys. For the love of god and everything holy, don't make EVERYTHING touch. And make the hardkeys physically distinct, so someone can grab the phone with one hand, locate the desired button by feel, and press it without having to look directly at the phone.

4. Two hardkeys on each side, with enough resistance to keep the button from being pressed by the weight of the phone, and some kind of tactile feedback to let the user unambiguously know when contact is made, and when contact is broken. Idea: for the vibrator, give it a brushless stepper motor whose axis of rotation is perpendicular to the screen (ie, the weight rotates clockwise and counterclockwise with respect to the screen) and at least four defined stopping points at 0, 90, 180, and 270 degrees. When a side button gets pressed, give the weight a hard kick towards the button that was pressed. When it gets released, spin the weight 180 degrees to the opposite position away from it.

Use case #1: thumb in contact with the upper button on one side, index finger in contact with the lower button on the other side.

Use case #2: index finger on upper side button, middle finger on lower side button.

Use: novel input method loosely based on morse code (using various permutations of the two buttons as chords & shift keys to enable things like backspace, return, upper/lowercase, punctuation, etc) for situations like driv^h^h^h^h discreet text entry (say, one hand in your backpack or purse holding the phone and doing text entry somewhere like a classroom).

Another novel use for the side buttons: combined with speech recognition, you could write the phone app so that if you press and hold a button during a call, it mutes the mic so you can speak one or more digits that get injected into the outbound audio stream as DTMF tones.

Ex: "Please enter your account number now." (user presses and holds side button, then says "two nine zero six five" and releases the button, at which point it sends the dtmf tones one by one ). Or, if you pressed, released, then pressed and held the button, it would play the dtmf tones as soon as you spoke the digit for each one. Since this is open-source, someone could customize it to substitute letters or words for each digit as a code, or a code word that corresponds to all the digits, so if someone eavesdrops all they'll discover are the spoken words that play the PIN code on that specific phone.

5. At least 640x480 resolution, on a display no smaller than the one on the HTC Vogue.

6. Not hardware-related, but a text input panel that acts like Graffiti 1 would instantly win lots of love from Palm refugees. If you must make it Graffiti 2 to keep the patent lawyers happy, make it trainable, so users could train it to recognize Graffiti 1 strokes anyway after purchase.

7. GPS and camera go without saying as mandatory and non-negotiable. Low-res with wide dynamic range & good low-light sensitivity wins over mega-megapixel resolution. A bright white LED would be nice, even if it ended up being useless for photos... they still make handy flashlights ;-)

8. Don't matrix the hardkeys. Or at least ensure that it's possible to simultaneously press every permutation of two hardkeys and reliably determine which two are depressed. Combined with gestures that include multiple presses and press-holds, you can get an amazing number of overloaded virtual hardkeys out of two physical buttons.

9. Make sure the phone can comfortably fit in both a rear and side pocket while wearing jeans. Women might swoon over ultra-thin phones, but a thick narrow phone fits in a back pocket a lot more comfortably than a wide-but-ultrathin phone... and is likely to survive accidentally sitting down with it in the pocket a lot better than the ultrathin design, too. Plus, a phone that's TOO small and thin is awkward to hold and use.

10. Please, for the love of god, give it a vibrator that's strong enough to feel with the phone in the back pocket of loose-but-not-baggy jeans. Every single phone I've owned over the past 10 years has been worse in this respect than the one that came before it. My Samsung SPH-i300 was tolerable. My PPC-6700 was weak. My HTC Vogue's vibrator is barely perceptible holding the phone in my hand, let alone in a pocket.

11. Don't forget the stylus. Check out the telescoping Seido styli for the HTC Vogue with built-in ballpoint pen. Please, make it insert into the top, and make the retention mechanism strong enough to keep it from falling out.

12. Hopefully it goes without saying, but bluetooth is absolutely non-negotiable. My cell phone is my real phone, and I have an AT&T cordless phone at home that pairs with it (otherwise, my phone would be on the wrong floor ~half the time, and in the wrong room ~80% of the time).

13. If you can, try to bully Sprint and Verizon into allowing phones with RU-IM cards. Sprint is probably a lost cause, but Verizon might be open to reason. Tell them it'll cut their insurance claims, because THEN people with expensive PDA phones won't have to take them to the beach or on canoe trips (because it's their only phone and they have no choice). It'll also make life easier for developers... we can buy a second line from them and a cheap, unlocked RU-IM phone made for India or China, then swap the two RU-IM cards back and forth at will. When working on development tasks, I can put my "real" RU-IM card into the basic phone, and my "development" RU-IM card into the Android phone & crash it freely without having to worry about missing a call while it's rebooting. Then, when I'm either feeling confident that my app works reliably, or I've reflashed it back to firmware known to be reliable, I can swap the RU-IM cards again and go back to using the Android phone as my "real" phone.

(note: for anyone who's never heard of RU-IM cards, they're an extension to GSM SIM cards for CDMA phones. In fact, you can use a RU-IM card in a GSM phone as if it WERE a SIM card. If you own a PPC-6700, take out the battery and look at the cavity under it... outside the US, there would be a socket there for the RU-IM card)

14. Make sure that the bluetooth drivers can establish multiple simultaneous virtual com ports. Why? Embedded hardware hobbyists will love you for it. IrDA ports might be history, but someone familiar with homebrew embedded hardware projects can always glue a BlueSMIRF to an IR LED with a Propeller, PIC, or AVR and use his phone as a grossly over-engineered universal remote anyway (Android to BlueSMIRF via Bluetooth, BlueSMIRF to microcontroller via UART, SPI, or I2C, and the MCU driving the LED through brute-force bit-banging) ;-)

15. I have no idea what its official name is, but the velvety black plastic used for the Sprint Touch's case is the greatest material you could ever use for a cell phone. It's not slippery. You can firmly and comfortably grip it without feeling like you're trying to hold on to a wet bar of soap that's been dipped in a bucket of K-Y. IMHO, there's an extra-toasty spot in hell reserved for the idiot who picked that horrible, slippery plastic used for Treos and PPC-6700. ;-)

Seriously, though, it really seems like the people who dictate the design of new phones are either willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of making it ultra-thin and/or wear their phones clipped to holsters.

Without S2U2 (slide 2 unlock) to REALLY lock the screen, the Sprint Touch is dysfunctional to the point of being fatally-flawed for anyone who walks around with the phone in his pocket. Before I discovered S2U2, I was making accidental phone calls, scrambling my phone settings, and generally making a daily mess of my phone because incoming calls would activate the touchscreen... and leave it active after the call was missed, with the catastrophic results you'd expect. I had to get two Assurion replacements for my PPC-6700 over the span of ~2 years, because my hand was damp and I accidentally sent it flying across the room.

Likewise, I can't think of a single new non-Sidekick that isn't completely dysfunctional for playing arcade games. It's like every manufacturer is terrified that the inclusion of a real gamepad will somehow condemn their phone to failure. The nGage didn't fail because it played games... it failed because the rest of the phone sucked worse than the games themselves did. Its only market was gamers, and gamers rejected it because it was a miserable excuse for both a phone AND a videogame. Give us a nice, well-rounded phone that's perfectly good for arcade games... but equally good at everything ELSE, too, so its ability to play games doesn't end up being its sole redeeming quality.

I do give Google and the Android team lots of credit for rejecting the iPhone meme and firmly saying 'no' to button-free phones. You can always ignore hardkeys in favor of a touchscreen, but you can't magically put hardkeys on a phone with ONLY a touchscreen. The biggest single problem with relying entirely on touchscreens is the fact that you can't effectively use them without actively LOOKING at them while you do. With real buttons, you can grab the phone with one hand, feel around for the buttons you need, and press them.